Negative and positive freedom

‘The will is a species of causality of living beings, insofar as they are rational, and freedom would be that quality of this causality by which it can be effectively independent of alien causes determining it; just as natural necessity is the quality of the causality of all beings lacking reason, of being determined to activity through the influence of alien causes.

The proposed definition of freedom is negative, and hence unfruitful in affording insight into its essence; yet a positive concept of freedom flows from it, which is all the more rich in content and more fruitful’ (Kant, 1785). Here we see that Immanuel Kant discerned two kinds of freedom –  negative and positive freedom.

Arthur Schopenhauer stated it as follows: ‘What is freedom? Strictly speaking this concept is negative. With it we only express the absence of any hindering and obstructing factor. This factor itself though is positive: it exerts a force’ (Schopenhauer, 1839).

In 1934 Erich Fromm emigrated to the United States, because of the upswing of national socialism in Germany. During the run-up and the outbreak of the Second World War he wrote his Escape from Freedom (1941). In this book he tried to explain the rise of Nazism and fascism as a collective fear for freedom because of a lack of inner freedom. ‘Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something – and if so, of what? […] … the main theme of this book: that man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an "individual", has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and die integrity of his individual self. […] But while in many respects the individual has grown, has developed mentally and emotionally, and participates in cultural achievements in a degree unheard of before, the lag between "freedom from" and "freedom to" has grown too. The result of this disproportion between freedom from any tie and the lack of possibilities for the positive realization of freedom and individuality has led, in Europe, to a panicky flight from freedom into new ties or at least into complete indifference.’

Whereas Kant and Schopenhauer focussed on individual freedom, Fromm has also taken into account the social and political implications. But yet his focus was in particular the development of the modern individual – man’s ‘individuation’. What exactly is meant with negative and positive freedom?

In his worth reading essay Two Concepts of Liberty liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin focusses especially on the political implications. He discerns the same two kinds of freedom: the freedom of interference and the freedom to self-determination. Negative freedom is the freedom of interference by anyone else. To achieve no-interference we have several opportunities. Of course we need mutual contact to express our wish for no-interference. Negative freedom can be arranged by explicit, but informal engagements. In practice this is the way most negative freedom is accomplished, both in the private and the public sphere. In fact formal engagements, like contracts, restrictions and laws are only necessary when informal engagements fail or tend to fail. In modern times this is the domain where the government drops in.

Once my negative freedom has been achieved, withdrawing myself in my private sphere will do. Because external forces do not affect me, I am free to do what I want within my private sphere. I am not obliged to anyone or anything else. For this reason negative freedom can also be defined as ‘passive freedom’.

The freedom to self-determination is totally different. It has nothing to do with the way I protect my private sphere.  It deals with the way I actively arrange my freedom. Positive freedom implies that every human being has a fundamental right to do what's necessary to secure a minimum level of well-being. This presupposes possibilities and provisions to achieve this, such as access to food, housing, jobs, medical care and education.

Because human living is essentially living together, the goal of positive freedom can't just be restricted to my own benefit or well-being, but also implies that of other people – of society in general. If necessary this implies a social responsibility to help each other in an active way to arrange a minimum of this freedom.  In a way, to all responsible citizens positive freedom is a social duty. In the modern welfare state we have handed over some of these duties to governments. Individually we can confine ourselves to good behaviour, kindness and our democratic duty to vote.

Whereas negative freedom deals with restriction, trespassing and penalties, positive freedom deals with awareness, education and self-development. According to Berlin for a true liberal both freedoms are indissolubly related to each other.

Nowadays freedom of thought, speech and act are mostly considered as negative freedom.  This is understandable because one can only be accused in a juridical sense when he has trespassed a restriction. In the Dutch constitution only legal restrictions are mentioned (article 7) but no articles for awareness. In juridical sense the final question is whether the law has been broken.

As long as there are like-minded people and equal interests in the society negative freedom will do. But in a society with opposite interests and non-congenial citizens – in other words: the real society – explicit positive freedom is indispensable. Take for instance a society with day-people and night-people. Say there is a democratic resolution for expelling (by law) nightly rumours. This implies negative freedom for the day-people and positive freedom for the night-people. Night-people are forced to shape their life according to the legal restriction concerning nightly rumours. The freedom of the one turns out to be the lack of freedom of the other.

Positive freedom implies that man is self-determined and possesses some kind of social ideal or goal. Liberals always have stressed that positive freedom ought in no way to be prescribed by anyone, also not by the state. Rightfully they argue that such a prescription would suggest that the state would know what is best for us. In that case institutions would be created to educate people in name of a certain truth. ‘To manipulate people, to direct them to goals that you know, but they probably don’t, means that their human being is denied, that they are treated as objects without free will and therefore are being humiliated’, as Berlin states. How manipulations can derail has been shown by communistic experiments with a forcing ideological assumption that there only exists one correct way of living which leads to the true classless society.

Unfortunately it is not given to every citizen to articulate his own goals or social ideals, nor to shape his life in that direction. Yet a certain minimum of mental baggage is essential for social and political engagement and for the preservation of our precious though fragile democracy. That’s why socialists, social democrats and liberals unanimously stress the importance of values – enlightenment values, democratic values and respect for human rights. In the Netherlands nowadays even some patriotism is on the liberal menu. With obliged educational curricula about citizenship and a canon of national and cultural history the Dutch government indirectly appeals to positive freedom. Liberal politicians demand explicitly for Muslims to lead their life in the Netherlands without the Quran, which in fact is imposed positive freedom. The Danish government is intending to criminalize males who seek up prostitutes. Kindergarten children have to eat institutional food and not what they take  from home, because institutional food is supposed to be more healthy. Do these measurements mean that the government restricts the personal freedom of individuals and family? The answer depends on the meaning of the word ‘freedom’.

Totalitarian states driven by ideology or religion depend heavily on imposed positive freedom. Yet here negative freedom is inevitable, as history learns. Each time the original idealists, the founding fathers, the leaders, the plan- or politburo turn out to reserve a kind of negative freedom for themselves on the base of their authority and supreme truth. This negative freedom reveals itself as – often unrestrained – privileges. In this way they stress their social distance to their own citizens. As Berlin states: ‘The essence of freedom – either positive or negative – is that we keep a distance to somebody else’.

All in all the conclusion is that people in charge and political leaders – whether liberals, socialists or communists – tend to reserve negative freedom for themselves and positive freedom for their target groups. More generally, the human condition depends on a more or less automatic mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. We tend to reserve negative freedom for ourselves and our own inner circle of kindred, trusted, righteous citizens. Usually the likely ones can automatically appeal to negative freedom, while the unlikely ones have to fight for their freedom by fulfilling positive demands which are imposed by the likely ones.

Usually the unlikely have to be ‘pacified’ in one or another way. An examined way to do this is a subjugation to the values of the inner circle. The outer circle is forced to hand over their credentials – ‘for their own sake and freedom’. This kind of imposing positive freedom always takes place on ideological grounds.  

Whether or not conscious, the mechanism of in- and exclusion is essential for the way in which we all deal with social and political questions. In the prehistory as well as in the modern political society the innate achievements and the inalienable rights of the inner circle people are usually self-explanatory and beyond doubt. At least they are not debated spontaneously. In the meantime the achievements and rights of the outer circle people appear to be a passionate subject of amazement, debate and conviction.

There’s no doubt that social in- and exclusion is reinforced by natural instinct. However positive freedom demands resisting unconscious automatisms like this, or at least the awareness and the expression of the undemocratic nature of it. Without exception historical endeavours to achieve monocultural or homogenous, positive moral societies have resulted in anti-liberal, immoral practices. These endeavours were all inspired by sentimental, romantic, nostalgic, but non-realistic fantasies. In the case of the society with day-people and night-people, such fantasies imply for instance that night-people are regarded as ‘failed citizens’. The conviction that such a failure is ‘past recovery’, is used as a legitimation of their exclusion from freedom and civil rights.

Each human society is made up of a wide variety of people – individualists and social characters, gentlemen and parasites, merciful and criminal, hospitable and intolerant. Each of these characterizations is subjective. What is ‘hospitable’ for the one, may be ‘naive’ for the other. In an alternative view ‘intolerant’ may be ‘outspoken’ and ‘determined’. In spite of the fact that a characterization like ‘tolerant’ is neither exactly definable, nor the specification of an absolute value, positive freedom should include all the characterizations mentioned above. The claim for freedom of the so called parasite, the criminal of the intolerant is not different from the claim of the gentle, merciful of hospitable. In these matters, only the law can discern (in terms of negative freedom), not politics.

So even if the night-people were unanimously regarded as intolerant, still the day-people should persistently endure and tolerate the intolerant. That is the ultimate message of positive freedom –both for the ingroup and the outgroup – to achieve a liveable society.[1]

In stating ‘freedom has nothing to say about what an individual does with his freedom’ Milton Friedman proves himself to be a true libertarian.[2] During his lifetime he exclusively stressed negative freedom. In the historical and social context this rather extreme position is quite understandable. As he stated in a 1995 interview: ‘The fundamental ideas come early’.[3] According to Friedman his best years were the 1940s to '60s. So it started in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II. And after that he was influenced by the political climate in the US during the Cold War. According to Joseph McCarthy it was the ‘war between two diametrically opposed ideologies’, a moral war between ‘our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world’. McCarthy added: ‘When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within’.[4] During the ‘Second Red Scare’ there was a polarized atmosphere of witch-hunts, blacklists, disloyalty and high treason.

Friedman had a profound aversion against communism because it ‘would destroy all of our freedoms’ (Friedman, 1962). But Friedman was neither an advocate of the McCarthyan allegations. In this case he was admirable consequent and confined himself to pure negative freedom. ‘It is intolerable for a man to be prevented from making voluntary arrangements with others that are mutually attractive because he believes in or is trying to promote communism. His freedom includes his freedom to promote communism.’ On the other hand, outside the United States Friedman felt no any inconvenience about positive freedom. He has been an explicit advocate of overthrowing foreign communistic or socialistic governments, even when they were democratically chosen. I’ll return to this topic in another chapter.  

Another influential libertarian in those years was (and still is) Ayn Rand.[5] In her peculiar novel Atlas Shrugged she outlines an imaginary society in which the free enterprisers have had enough of the obstruction and contempt by the government. They refuse to strain themselves any longer for society’s sake. With support of the mysterious John Galt, the novel’s hero, all captains of industry disappear without a trace, one after another. All business halts, the motor of the world stops running.

The message of Atlas Shrugged is that society stagnates when the individual is not free to express his creativity and energy, when private interest is suppressed, and when the ‘prime movers’ are subjugated by the government and have to play ‘the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altar of others’.

Near the end of the novel John Galt reveals himself and holds a radio speech (of fifty pages). He concludes with the words: ’I swear – by my life and my love for it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine’.

At the age of 21 Ayn Rand (her true name was Alisa Rosenbaum) fled from her native country, the Soviet Union, and settled in the United States. There she obtained a reputation as a writer of novels, philosophical essays and film scripts. A major source of inspiration was her intense aversion against communism. In the Soviet Union she got to know altruism as a virtue imposed by the state. For the Soviet leaders this ‘altruism’ was the legitimation for collective property – in practice: ‘rightful’ theft from individuals and redistribution at own consent. Quite understandable that Rand’s ideal was the opposite – a society based on an atomistic kind of freedom, an extreme utilitarian kind of capitalism in which helpfulness and social engagement were considered to be the roots of evil.

Politics exclusively based on negative, passive freedom inevitably will result in an atomistic society based on the territorial distance of predators. Oswald Spengler (1931) has falsely assumed: ‘Man is a beast of prey. […]… the tactics of his living are those of a splendid beast of prey, brave, crafty, and cruel. He lives by attacking and killing and destroying. He wills, and has willed ever since he existed, to be master’.

In the early twentieth century such a view was popular, especially among those who regretted the drawback of old aristocracy and the expected upcoming ‘revolt of the masses’. They considered the weakness of social affects and the impotence of the parliamentary democracy as signals of the decline of the ‘Evening-land’.

Human freedom however is never atomistic. Freedom – even negative freedom – has its domain: a home, a family, a native region, tradition, a place and time to dwell. Man may have left everything behind, he may be totally free, but under these circumstances – no home, family or tradition holds him back – he doesn’t feel free. The human nature of experiencing freedom has something to do with familiarity, feeling at home in place, time, habits and mores. Deep inside positive freedom is stimulated by the desire for this familiarity and the fear to remain orphaned and displaced. Social beings are fearful for loneliness (which in fact is absolute negative freedom).

But what about positive freedom? History has shown that ideas about a society exclusively based on positive freedom are idealized and depicted into a herd ‘of millions and hundreds of millions of people – disunited, and scattered over the territory of a huge country’ whose will is forged ‘into a single will.’ Here ‘morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle’. (Vladimir Lenin, 1920)[6]

Obviously both views – absolute negative and absolute positive freedom – are unrealistic and their impact on society will be unbearable on the long term. From origin man was neither a self-ruling territorial predator, nor a prey at the mercy of the collective and the herd instinct. Most likely our hominid ancestors lived in small hierarchical, social groups. The social order was primarily a matter of biochemical disposition.[7] Social order was merely natural order.

In evolutionary timescale it’s just a short while since those days. The development of self-consciousness is from  a recent era. In self-consciousness the human being got acquainted with the experience of mental distance – a distance to others and to ourselves. Between the spectator and the spectacle some delicate mental space was created and this space appeared to be free from natural necessity. Freedom appeared as a vague conscious opposite of this necessity. At the same time in evolution they both must have appeared as a package deal – the consciousness of freedom and necessity.

Freedom looks like a kind of mental space. What precisely is this space? It is very hard to formulate what freedom is. In trying this we face the same problems as in defining the free space in physics – the ‘nothing’. It’s hard to describe this either. The best way to do that is to describe it in a negative way and to oppose the nothing to the things. Generally we describe the free space as the absence of matter. As long as we cannot discern things, we cannot say anything about ‘nothing’, not even in a negative way.

Erich Fromm has tried to describe the way in which our ancestors became acquainted with the concept of freedom. It started ‘when the lack of fixation of action by instincts exceeds a certain point; when the adaptation to nature lost its coercive character’. ‘In the animal there is an uninterrupted chain of reactions starting with a stimulus, like hunger, and ending with a more or less strictly determined course of action, which does away with the tension created by the stimulus. In man that chain is interrupted. The stimulus is there but the kind of satisfaction is "open", that is, he must choose between different courses of action.’ (Erich Fromm, 1941). Fromm noted that freedom – the lack of determination by and alliance with natural instincts – has caused basic human loneliness, insecurity and fear. In this circumstances the individual only could develop mentally, emotionally, socially and culturally when the lag between negative and positive freedom wasn’t too big. That’s why positive freedom has always been facilitated by religion, priests, rituals and later by explicit norms and values.  People need grip, support, habits and intelligible structure.  Without these faculties negative freedom causes panic and herd behaviour. History shows us many examples of cultural fall-back because of a disproportion between negative and positive freedom.